Difficult Conversations

Great concepts on how communication goes and misses our intended mark. I believe most people begin communicating with the best of intentions, then let their emotions get in the way to forget what the intended outcomes were. Understanding our own emotions, most of us are lost are lost but at the end we all want what’s best for ourselves and what’s best for ourselves is to get along with everyone. This is something that I have pondered and wondered for quite some time now. I often struggled with the reasons why people were confrontational. It made no sense to put any one down or say they are in the wrong. I always have been told treat people well with kindness and respect. But communication is defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, and evaluating. A difficult conversation is any conversation that you dread and perhaps seek to avoid, if possible. There are the situations that keep you up at night in anticipation that you put off or face up to like bad medicine. Our typical approach to the complexity of what happened, the reality of feeling and potential threat to our identity tend to make our conversations more difficult, rather than more productive, often escalating conflict, hurting feelings and damaging relationships indeed, it is our intuitive understanding of this danger that leads us to want to avoid such conversations given how we are likely to handle the conversations, our fears are justified. But unfortunately sometimes assumptions make avoiding a conversation just as problematic. We continue to feel upset. We may feel like such a wimp for not standing up for ourselves. The problem gets worse, since we have done nothing to change the other person’s view or give them the benefit of our view. And the relationship deteriorates anyway, as our lead us to distance and disconnect.